FINAL WORD
EDITOR’S QUESTION
DRAGAN PETKOVIC, ECEMEA
CLOUD PLATFORM LEADER,
IDM/SECURITY, ORACLE
New guidelines are a step in the
right direction in reducing risk for the
Internet infrastructure in Africa. Its
instant benefit is raising the awareness
and encouraging open communication.
Oracle is recognised as partner
in protecting critical national
infrastructure and it is encouraging
to see protection of critical national
infrastructure being part of the
guidelines. Security is in our DNA,
our first customers were high profile
national security agencies and today
several governments have their CERTs
based on Oracle solutions.
Personally, I find Africa exciting for the
leaps in technology advancements that
the continent has traditionally taken.
We witnessed the leap from PC era,
going directly into mobile devices.
is a cornerstone of cloud security.
When running our Customer Advisory
Boards we’ve noticed that best run
security operations have unified
Identity Management with Security
Information and Event Management
and this was the inspiration to our
Identity SOC.
By unifying Identity Cloud Services,
our Identity Management solutions
for the cloud and on-premise, machine
learning, user entity, behaviour
analytics and Cloud Access Security
Broker, we believe we have achieved
an agile security infrastructure which
is better suited for modern security
challenges across on-premise and in
the cloud.
With Africa rapidly transitioning to
cloud, we see Identity SOC in general
and CASB in particular being key
strategies for cybersecurity. ¡
T
he International Data
Corporation (IDC) forecasts
that more than 80% of IT
organisations will be committed to
hybrid cloud architectures by the end
of this year, vastly driving the rate and
pace of change in organisations. In
addition, its analysts predict that by
2018, at least half of IT spending will
be cloud based, reaching 60% of all
IT infrastructure, and 60 to 70% of
all software, services and technology
spending by 2020.
Oracle has recently pioneered the
concept of Identity SOC. We’ve noticed
that only the largest organisations
were operating SOCs and only a
handful of them successfully. There are
many reasons why operating SOC has
not shown business benefits, the main
ones being the static nature or SOC
rules which are hard to maintain and
easy to bypass, lack of skilled resources
and, above all, event driven nature of
traditional SIEM solutions.
While companies born in the ‘cloud
era’, such as Airbnb, Amazon and
Snapchat, have utilised public cloud
since inception (and shown the scale
and business successes is offers),
blue-chip companies are no different,
with many reducing their data
centre footprints by moving into the
Monitoring modern infrastructures such
as cloud or hybrid is next to impossible
with a traditional approach, as identity
INTELLIGENTCIO
The increasingly prominent role of public cloud in African
business’ IT strategy brings an urgent need for a cloud-scale
data management platform, explains Anton Jacobsz, Managing
Director of Networks Unlimited.
Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
helps translating on-premise security
policies and data protection rules to
the cloud. It is one of hottest areas in
security with 39.7% CAGR, compared
to single digit growth of IT Security
market globally. Our investment is
paying off rapidly and we see exciting
new use cases all over the world.
Now with the improvement of
connectivity, I believe sophisticated
on-premise data centres will soon make
way for a cloud-first approach. It is
important that derived guidelines cover
security for the cloud as well.
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The irresistible allure
and unstoppable rise
of the public cloud
www.intelligentcio.com
www.intelligentcio.com
cloud – and ensuring that they do
not become obsolete in this new
computing landscape.
“The digitisation of business requires
enterprises to move faster and be
more agile to survive. Applying new
technologies to existing business
activities (how do we leverage AI
to increase customer satisfaction?)
fuels the cloud paradigm. For
many enterprises, public cloud
represents the ability to rapidly
access resources for innovation
while operating in a data-rich
environment,” notes Rubrik’s
Guide to Public Cloud, a technical
white paper by the cloud
management company.
The paper highlights that enterprise
IT looking to increase cloud usage
will find that marrying non-cloud
systems with cloud-native applications
and infrastructure poses new principles.
These, it states are:
•
•
Shift from asset to service
consumption: Traditional IT is
largely based on providing finite
assets that service relatively
stable workloads and predictable
business growth. In a cloud
model, IT rapidly provisions
services accordingly to
business demand.
Automate service delivery:
With cloud, near-zero time
to market can be delivered
through automation frameworks.
Infrastructure becomes
programmable through code by
being structured into templates
INTELLIGENTCIO
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